The Universal Law of Persistence: Why Staying the Course Builds Empires
Today is time for a reality check for me. I’ve been stuck analyzing data for my blog hoping one day it’ll blow up overnight and refreshing my email and stalking the NSF website to see if the government shutdown has ended yet (I’m still waiting to hear about my grant). It’s disheartening and sometimes soul-crushing, but here we are. Instead of refreshing one more time (for the 482nd time today), I decided to look into persistence, which is something I happen to excel at.
Some people think success happens fast with a flash of genius, a viral moment, or a sudden “yes” that rewrites everything.
But the truth is quieter, slower, and far more patient than that, it’s just a heartbeat that never stops.
It’s the invisible discipline of showing up again and again when no one claps.
It’s persistence, the one law of the universe that governs everything from stars to startups.
Because whether you’re forging galaxies or writing blog post number eight hundred and nineteen (this one), the rule remains the same: what stays in motion long enough begins to create its own gravity.
Overnight Success
We love a good success story that skips the middle part, the years of doubt, the quiet grind, the invisible effort that no one sees.
I, personally, crave the end of the movie, not the messy middle. In fact that messy middle gives me raging anxiety and I might Google how it ends because I’m too impatient to let things play out how they should.
A 2010 Harvard Business School paper on “Performance Persistence in Entrepreneurship” found that entrepreneurs with a prior successful exit are about 30% more likely to succeed in their next ventures compared to first-timers, which showed how market-timing skills and persistence seem to build on each other.
Another study I found was a 2016 HBR article, “4 Factors That Predict Startup Success, and One That Doesn’t,” which highlights execution, team persistence, and market fit as key predictors of profitability, more so than just the actual idea itself.
And as if these two don’t do enough for it, a 2021 HBR piece “Why Start-ups Fail,” identifies rushing into changes without validating customer feedback as a common failure pattern, showing that unwavering persistence in refining a core vision often leads to better long-term profitability.
We love to glorify reinvention, but sometimes, staying the course is the boldest act of innovation we could possibly make.
Endurance or Grit
Persistence isn’t just poetic and magical, it’s actually measurable.
When the brain sees progress (even microscopic progress), dopamine releases in anticipation, not in the completion of whatever it is you’re working on. That means consistency doesn’t just lead to motivation, it more so creates it.
Every time you make a small step toward a bigger goal, your brain rewards you with a surge of chemical reinforcement that says: keep going. That’s why founders who build systems around repetition, like daily blogging, rewriting old posts, or refining a single project over years, end up outperforming those who constantly chase the next best idea.
Novelty is addictive and it’s so easy to be sidetracked in a world where everything is 30 second videos on your phone, but mastery, is more where power compounds.
Angela Duckworth called it grit, Navy SEALs call it embracing the suck, my husband Zak calls it pushing through fatigue (and pain), but it’s all the same thing really. Every time you resist the urge to quit and instead go back and work on what you already have, you’re strengthening your brain’s endurance muscle. You’re literally training your mind to outlast chaos.
And chaos is truly the state of every dream worth having in my professional dreamer opinion.
We live in a culture of pivoting where founders pivot, writers rebrand, influencers reimagine, and every time something doesn’t “take off” in six months, we burn the field and start over from scratch.
But what if the field was never the problem, what if the soil just needed one more season of sun?
The world rewards endurance differently than it rewards speed. Fast things go viral, but steady things have the power to reshape industries over time. It feels like you can outlast your competition more than anything else if you aren’t as talented or skilled. My own persistence with the countless posts, drafts, three hours per day, rewrites, and the days when it felt like shouting into the void is another one I’m hoping will eventually have a happy ending attached to it.
Persistence works best when it’s directional, it’s not about refusing to change, it’s about evolving within a consistent ecosystem.
We’ll take my own personal journey here as an example, where my blog is working to become the foundation.
Blockchain Botany became the extension of my curiosity about growth, reward systems, and the strong desire I always have to teach people things. Dopamine Hobbies is just another extension of this blog, where more crafts I like doing have a place.
Each and every branch grows from the same tree. That’s what Harvard’s data doesn’t capture in my opinion, it’s not just staying with one idea, it’s staying with one vision. When you tend to the same ecosystem long enough, the soil starts giving back.
Time Will Move With or Without You
Persistence obeys the law of exponential math.
In the beginning, growth is all but invisible with a whole lot of input, and hardly any output.
Then one day, something shifts and there’s a small rise, some sort of sign that what you built has mass now, it’s been orbiting long enough to attract gravity.
Don’t forget that every blog post compounds authority, every grant application compounds confidence, and every “failed” experiment compounds understanding in a way that only doing can teach you.
Persistence multiplies returns over time because time itself is the most powerful multiplier we have. Five years in, what once felt like shouting into space starts echoing back at you.
Also, time is going to pass whether you do anything with it or not. Might as well use time to your advantage and treat it as a resource just like food and water to build whatever kind of life you want to have.
Inspiration on this Halloween Day
James Dyson didn’t quit after 5,000 prototypes.
Colonel Sanders started KFC at 65, after a thousand rejections.
Sara Blakely was laughed out of boardrooms before Spanx became a billion-dollar idea.
Einstein was a patent clerk when he changed the nature of time.
It’s widely believed that Thomas Edison and his team conducted thousands of experiments, possibly over 1,000 different materials and over 10,000 total prototypes, to create a commercially available light bulb.
None of them found shortcuts, they just stayed long enough for the pattern to reveal itself over enough time.
And that’s the true secret, persistence doesn’t force success, it just uncovers it. It’s the act of staying in the experiment until reality bends around your vision.
Check out this post from Sam Parr that really hit the other day when my motivation was low and I was feeling beyond discouraged with my plateau of 1,000 visits per day on my blog.
This massively successful founder (who I’ve spoken about before on here), says that nothing looks like progress for a long time and then suddenly you realize just how far you’ve come.
Most people give up right before success. Another person I followed for a while was a NYT bestseller named Alessandra Torre who self published books and made millions doing it. In an interview I watched with her she said she had a friend who didn’t take off until their 28th book published. It took 27 books to get there, and she said the biggest life lesson she learned from that was to not quit before your miracle is coming, because it comes for everyone if you wait long enough.
Success doesn’t always look like arrival, it just looks like momentum that no longer depends on you alone to keep pushing uphill. Eventually that plateau will lead to a little curve down enough that you can let go a little more.
There is no real overnight success, just a bunch of hard work leading up to the turning point and then everyone will say suddenly, oh, you were lucky.
So here’s the invitation for you and me to stop asking if it’s working yet and just enjoy the ride.
You’ve already proven you can start, now the only question that matters is, can you keep going long enough for the math of time to catch up with the faith you’ve already got?
Reads You Might Enjoy:
Soul-Sized Work: What Happens When Your Passion Can’t Pay the Bills
Why We Romanticize Burnout: The Toxic Myth of Glorious Exhaustion
How Visionary Entrepreneurs Quietly Shaped My Wildest Dreams
The Science of Awe: What Happens When Wonder Floods the Brain
The Quiet Weight of a Civilization That Vanished: The Mystery of the Indus Valley’s Disappearance
